Slavery was a system with many rules, and a little farm town broke all of them.

When Cesar Peters saw that the townspeople of Hebron had come to rescue him and his family from being sold away from the farming community where they lived and worked, the salt tears dried on his cheeks. White townspeople decided that they would not stand idly by as an esteemed and enslaved family were sold to settle a debt, and they acted together, as a community, to protect the Peters family. In a landscape where dependence on slave labor was profound, an enslaved family was honored by bold civic action for their value as good neighbors, not as property. next >>